This is first Russian laptop, made under the brand “Elektronika”. The production started in 1991 and lasted not very long due to the high price of the device – none of the common people could afford themselves such devices. The price for the computer was around $6000, that equals 25,000 roubles according to that time’s exchange rate, when the average salary across the country was 500 roubles (50 times less!).

As we mentioned before in the article “How the richest Russians became rich” at that time there were practicaly no people who earned a lot and could afford such hardware for personal use. It was mainly produced for larger industrial factory engineers so that they could carry it along with them and plug to the larger machines they operated.

It has been reported that not more than a thousand of such computers were produced. The exact technical specifications are not very clear.

According to people who used them the specifications were as following:

if it was a 16 bit 8086 (or clone), then you can only address up to 64KB of memory, not 1MB. at 1991, a computer with 1MB would have been be MUCH MORE expensive, and nobody would need 1MB with with everydays DOS-programs at this time. 🙂

These were top of the line models. There were cheaper laptops available at the time. In 1991 the overall median household income in the United States was $40,873. One of these computers was approximately 1/10th the median household income. Sorry I don’t have more time to find median personal income figures for the United States in 1991. Median household income data is from the US Census Bureau via Wikipedia:

I don’t understand why the Russian responders are so upset by this post. I am an American, I had a laptop that looked almost EXACTLY like this one. This is what laptops looked like in the late 80’s and early 90’s